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Monday, March 11, 2013

Teaching Creatively Blog Hop- Day 1

This awesome blog hop is hosted by the Schoolhouse Review Crew. There are nearly 80 bloggers taking these topics daily and letting you learn and explore more options to your homeschool days!

I love reading other blogs. I get a lot of fresh ideas on things that might work well with my kids and neat activities to incorporate into our schooling day.

Delight - Directed Teaching is simply allowing the child to lead. My homeschooling has always had this to a degree. I may stray for a while to do something "I" want to do but we always go back to a topic of my child's choice.

If you can allow this into your homeschooling you may find that your child has a spark of interest that you never knew of!

(I've been saving items for Robots!!)

My oldest Kyle has always come up with some really great topics to study. The older he is getting the harder it is for me to provide items because of the lack of knowledge on my part. Honestly though I've learned more homeschooling my children than I ever did in school.

We homeschool 8 weeks and then we take a 2 week break all year long. We are those "Year-Rounders" you hear about!

During our break I will normally casually ask my kids what they want to learn next. I have them scribble it down on a sheet of paper or I do so myself and then I try to start digging around in the items I already have. Then I hit the internet and try to find activities and ideas on the topic.

We are currently on our break and this is my kids list for the next 8 weeks.

Zachary (8)

Bears

Robots

Mummies

Knights & Castles

Planes

Alexis (9)

Scorpions

Sharks

Rainforest

Seahorses

Kyle (12)

Presidents Past/Present

First Automobiles

Government

The Sea

Planets

Will we get to all of these??

No, but I will get to almost 3 per child normally within a 8 week period.

I love the choices they come up with! I enjoy seeing them learn something that they are excited about. Also teaching this way allows the child to be invested and enjoy learning.

(Lexi loves her Chickens and always is learning new things about them on her own.)

We do these studies for about 30 minutes daily and the children normally do not need my help (excluding Zachary).

You know when you have an idea about something you normally will try harder than if someone gave you that idea... Same method here. Let your child make his mark. Let them see that learning can be fun and that it doesn't always have to come from a text book or workbook. Learning is all around us!! Let them explore it.